There is a way to smile through your eyes: to see the beauty behind the appearance of things. Imagine looking at a person who is forlorn and broken and has a bad self-image, and seeing the hidden beauty in that person. When you smile, that person sees their beauty through your eyes. Imagine the gift you are offering that person... A silent, gentle gift of love.
Every day you have choices. You can do things that wound your soul, like being dominated by the work ethic or compulsively seeking more money and possessions, or you can be around people who give you pleasure and do things that satisfy a desire deep inside you. Make this soul care a way of life, and you may discover what the Greeks called eudaimonia—a good spirit, or, in the deepest sense, happiness.
When imagination is allowed to move to deep places, the sacred is revealed. The more
different kinds of thoughts we experience around a thing and the deeper our reflections
go as we are arrested by its artfulness, the more fully its sacredness can emerge.
Most of us put a great deal of times into work, not only because we have to work so many hours to make a living, but because work is central to the soul's OPUS. We are crafting ourselves -- individuating. Work is fundamental to the OPUS because the whole point of life is the fabrication of the soul.
Old illustrations show God tuning the great musical instrument of creation... We all vibrate sympathetically like different octaves of the same tone, our human hearts pulsing in the same rhythms as those of the material and spiritual worlds... We know we are well on the way toward soul when we feel interconnected to the world and the people around us and when we live as much from the heart as from the head.
Nicholas of Cusa described human creativity as a participation in the act of God creating the cosmos. God creates the cosmos, we create the microcosmos, the "human world". As we do our daily work, make our homes and marriages, raise our children, and fabricate a culture, we are all being creative... The ultimate work is an engagement with soul, responding to the demands of fate and tending the details of life as it presents itself. We may get to a point where our external labors and the OPUS of the soul are one and the same, inseparable. Then the satisfactions of our work will be deep and long lasting, undone neither by failures nor by flashes of success.
